GLAM/Newsletter/May 2017/Contents/UK report
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Spreading Enlightenment
WikiCite
Several UK volunteers, as well as representatives from UK universities and other organisations, attended WikiCite in Vienna. See this month's Wikidata report.
Digitisation Grants Available
The TWA Digitisation Grant fund is aimed at UK archives (including business archives), special collections libraries and museums, and offers funding grants of up to £5000 for institutions to digitise their collections. The fund will be accepting applications until 7 July 2017. More details and how to apply can be found at: https://www.townswebarchiving.com/twa-digitisation-grant/
Oxford
Due to the work of the University of Oxford Wikimedian In Residence, Martin Poulter, Oxford University Press have added the biographical dictionary Electronic Enlightenment to the Wikipedia Library. EE has been added to the OUP Scholarship package, which gives access for one year at a time to EE and eight other reference resources. EE has shared its person identifiers with Wikidata, and more than 3,000 individuals have been matched. This allows us to create target lists of people in both EE and Wikidata who lack a Wikipedia article, or who lack an English Wikipedia article but have articles in other languages.
Martin presented at a meeting of the GLAM Digital Strategy Implementation Board about Wikidata as a platform for turning GLAM catalogue data into materials to support research and education. The next step is to press for a pilot project with some museum data. Other presentations and workshops this month included IT Services, the Department of Psychiatry, the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, the Cairns Library at the John Radcliffe Hospital, the Negotiated Text Network (which has a lot of detail about the creation of "contested texts" such as the Constitution of the United States) and the AssyrOnline group (an international collaboration sharing data, text and images about objects with Cuneiform inscriptions).
Staff at EE and Wikisource volunteers are taking part in a Wikisource transcription of a biographical dictionary of printers. Help is welcome!
We are working through a data donation from the Atlas of Hillforts (a new database of archaeological sites in the UK and Ireland) to prepare for import into Wikidata.
The journal Vestiges: Traces of Record is trying a journal-to-wiki publication workflow to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Cameroon. Starting this summer, the journal will host biographical notes written by field researchers. These short biographies will be published by the journal under a CC-By licence, from where they can be copied with attribution into Wikipedia. Martin is acting as an editorial advisor to ensure the articles are Wikipedia-compatible.
